On conscience

How are we to make sense of the confused and conflicted contemporary discourse on morality, on questions of right and wrong, freedom and conscience?

On one hand, we hear the oft-repeated refrain that personal freedom is the highest value and that, therefore, the individual conscience, which is the guardian of personal freedom, is the highest and sole authority over questions of right and wrong. The individual conscience, we are told, is both inviolable and infallible. Any effort to frame conscience within a broader context whose points of reference are objective truth and goodness is perceived as a threat to individual freedom that must be defended against. Each person has his own truth; each person decides for himself what is good or bad. We ought therefore to be tolerant of disparate viewpoints regarding the essence of human life and we should seek to promote foundational diversity in our communities and institutions.

On the other hand, our public conversation is saturated with heated discourses in which individuals and groups take determined moral stands on topics as varied as the environment, race, gender relations, immigration and the gap between rich and poor. The moral positions that are staked out in these discourses presume standards of right and wrong whose authority precedes and contextualizes the authority of individual conscience.

What emerges from a cursory study of our contemporary discourse is that we human beings are in fact deeply moral beings who more often than not take strong positions on the rightness or wrongness of things. Moreover, our commitment to promoting diversity is not nearly as far-reaching as we often presume. For example, how many of us would, in the spirit of promoting diversity, want our schools to hire publicly avowed neo-Nazis or members of some other group that holds manifestly morally repugnant views?

That we are deeply moral beings suggests that we do not actually live as if individual freedom were the highest and sole value. That we often do stake out moral positions implies that we understand, or at least intuit, that there is a difference between liberty and license where license, stripped from any reference to objective truth and goodness, devolves into reckless and destructive self-expression while liberty, set as it is within the protective frame of the True and the Good, is an ennobling value rooted in the inviolable dignity of the human person who, as an intelligent and willing being made in the image and likeness of God, is called to exercise his freedom in a spirit of responsibility for his own and others’ well-being.

If there is some objective pre-set measure of what is right and wrong, i.e., what leads humanity to life and what leads us to death, then it follows that someone had to establish the measure. This someone is God, who brought us into existence so that we might come to know the joy of living.

How does conscience fit into God’s plan to lead us into life? If conscience is not the seat of self-justification, what use is there for conscience? Conscience is an internal organ of sorts with which we listen to the voice of God sharing with us the truth of who we are meant to be. It is not the voice of God itself. Conscience is not an oracle. Rather, conscience brings us back to an awareness of the fundamental contours of a genuine human life, back to an awareness of foundational principles of good and evil which have been obscured by sin. As it helps us to hear the voice of God, conscience also helps us to use this remembered knowledge in making decisions about the right way to proceed in concrete circumstances. It helps us to judge what the right course of action is in the multitude of particular situations we encounter each day.

If conscience is like an organ, it follows that it needs to be trained so that it can grow to maturity. Conscience is not a mechanical tool ready to use straight out of the box. Like speech, it is a power that needs help to develop. Like speech, if it does not get proper training it will atrophy. This training comes from the outside, from sources that are themselves already mature in the art of hearing the voice of God. A key player in this formation is the church, which has been specially entrusted by God with the task of teaching humanity what true human life looks like.

Conscience is, therefore, not infallible. It is inviolable because the human person cannot be coerced to accept the truth, but it is not infallible. The less mature it is, the less well it remembers the foundational principles of good and evil, and thus it is more susceptible to making errors in judgment about how best to act in concrete situations.

The responsibility that goes hand in hand with genuine freedom also must accompany conscience. God would show us the way to life, but we must assume the great responsibility of diligently forming the internal organ by which we are granted to hear his voice and chart a path forward to life for ourselves and others.

Father Mark Doherty, who serves at St. Peter and St. Anthony parishes in San Francisco, is studying moral theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.